“Our Economic System Is at Risk. Even Our Political System Is at Risk. Our Way of Life Cannot Continue Unless We Find Some Way to Make People Aware of What Shiller’s Nobel-Prize-Winning Research Teaches Us All About How Stock Investing Works in the Real World.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

You can work on a book and work a job.  There are plenty of hours in a day.  Millions of people work on more than one thing.  There is nothing special in your case.

There is something special. Say that stocks continue to perform in the future at least somewhat as they have always performed in the past. That means that we will be going to a CAPE of 8. From a CAPE of 30. That’s a loss of something in the neighborhood of 70 percent. Not for one person. For millions and millions of people. All at the same time. Collective losses that big will cause a severe economic contraction (because people will react to the huge losses by cutting back on spending). So we will see hundreds of thousands of businesses go under and millions of people thrown out of work. We will see political frictions dramatically exacerbated. Especially when people find out that all of this was 100 percent avoidable, that peer-reviewed research was published 41 years ago pointing us all to a better way but that they have never seen it discussed because these Buy-and-Hold goon squads will not permit it.

Would you say that people should contiue sitting at their desks and doing their ordinary jobs when there is a bomb threat in the building? I say “no,” they should take quick action. They should make the removal of the bomb threatening everyone’s life a top priority. Our economic system is at risk. Even our political system is at risk. Our way of life cannot continue unless we find some way to make people aware of what Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. Opening the entire internet to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research is not just a nice idea. It is an absolute imperative. We need to achieve this goal by the afternoon of May 13, 2002, if not a good bit sooner. We are already far, far behind schedule.

Have you considerd what it would mean for all of us and our futures if it turns out that I was right in what I said in my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002 — that Greaney’s retirement study really does lack a valuation adjustment, just like I (and, in recent days, Evidence as well) said? Yikes! Holy moly! Yowsa! The proper thing to do when one learns that one got an important number wrong in a retirement study is to correct that darn study!

Do you see?

Rob